☕️ Tesla stock drops 8% despite record deliveries

Good morning. Markets are closed today for Independence Day. Here's what's making news.

In today's newsletter:

🚗 Tesla stock drops 8% despite record deliveries

💾 Intel stock drops 9% ahead of July 23 earnings

🎬 China's Kling AI raises $2B at $15B valuation

☁️ AI data center startup Crusoe raising $3B at $30B value

🪙 Securitize goes public and tokenizes its own stock

Plus: 🌍 7 macro news, 🏢 6 corporate news, 💰 4 deal flow, and 📑 6 research & reports.

📊 Before The Bell

📰 Top News

• Tesla shares fell 8.3% Thursday to an intraday low of $390, even after the carmaker reported its strongest-ever second-quarter deliveries, showing investors were unmoved by the operational rebound.
• The company delivered 480,126 vehicles in the April–June quarter, up about 25% from roughly 384,000 a year earlier, helped by European EV incentives, corporate fleet electrification, and higher fuel prices after the Iran conflict.
• Despite the delivery beat, Tesla remains down 13% in 2026 and trades about 27% below its $498.83 record; the stock had briefly rallied 15% in May before resuming its decline ahead of July 22 earnings.

• Intel shares slid 9% to $127.02 on Wednesday and another 5% to $120.35 on Thursday, giving back part of a first-half gain of roughly 270%, as investors dumped chip stocks ahead of the company's July 23 earnings.
• The selloff hit the sector broadly, with the VanEck Semiconductor ETF down more than 5% after a report that Meta may sell excess AI computing capacity raised doubts about how scarce AI computing power will stay.
• Intel's roughly $638 billion valuation, about 12 times revenue, sits on a business still losing money, with a $2.4 billion foundry operating loss and just $174 million in outside manufacturing sales last quarter that the July 23 report must show is inflecting.

• Kuaishou's AI video unit Kling AI raised about $2.8 billion (19 billion yuan) targeting a $15 billion valuation, sending the Chinese short-video company's Hong Kong shares up as much as 6.89% before they trimmed the gain to 0.75%.
• Tencent, whose Hunyuan platform competes directly with Kling AI, put in $200 million as part of a round backed by 21 independent investors, a deal that will cut Kuaishou's own stake in the subsidiary to 68%.
• The cash injection comes as China's AI video generators fight for share, with Kling AI—claiming over 60 million creators globally since its June 2024 launch—increasingly pushing for growth beyond its home market.

• AI infrastructure startup Crusoe is in talks to raise roughly $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg, a figure that would nearly triple the $10 billion mark it reached in October 2025.
• The Denver company, founded in 2018, abandoned its original flared-gas crypto-mining business and now builds and runs full AI data-centre campuses, including a near one-million-square-foot Texas site serving OpenAI and Oracle under the $500 billion Stargate initiative.
• Crusoe's bet is that owning every layer — power, construction and cloud operations — sets it apart from rivals like CoreWeave, Lambda and Nebius that lease capacity, as investors increasingly back who controls AI's scarce physical infrastructure over who builds the models.

• Securitize, a tokenization firm backed by BlackRock and ARK Invest, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SECZ on Thursday and simultaneously made its own shares available as blockchain tokens.
• The stock closed 10% higher on its first day after merging with the publicly-traded shell company Cantor Equity Partners II, while investors held some $295 million in tokenized SECZ shares, per data from RWA.xyz.
• The token versions, issued on the Solana and Avalanche blockchains, represent the same NYSE-listed common stock rather than a separate security, a model supporters say can shorten settlement times and enable around-the-clock transfers.

🌍 Macro News

• Yen surges most since April intervention on renewed Japanese currency action fears. LINK
• Brent crude falls near $71 as Hormuz shipments rise, Iran talks progress. LINK
• Russia's central bank says major banks are ready for digital ruble by September 1. LINK
• US government nears voluntary AI model release standards, announcement possible next week. LINK
• US labor force participation rate fell to 61.5%, lowest since March 2021. LINK
• Canada approves new Trans Mountain pipeline to boost Asian oil market access. LINK
• US Treasury sanctions 134 crypto wallets tied to ISIS-K affiliate financing. LINK

🏢 Corporate News

• Zuckerberg admits AI agents progressed slower than expected despite huge spending. LINK
• Amazon nears launch of Leo satellite broadband after exceeding 390 satellites orbited. LINK
• Kraken parent Payward completes $600 million acquisition of stablecoin firm Reap. LINK
• Palantir's Karp says trust, not capability, is enterprise AI's biggest weakness. LINK
• PayPal joins European Payments Council to help shape regional payment standards. LINK
• IQM lists on Nasdaq via SPAC at $1.9 billion, shares trade lower. LINK

📈 Stocks

📑 Research & Reports

• SemiAnalysis says Meta cloud rumors wrongly spooked neocloud stocks like CoreWeave. LINK
• Asian AI hardware suppliers drive record highs across South Korea, Japan, Taiwan. LINK
• Citi warns record memory chip prices may squeeze cloud giants' AI returns. LINK
• Study finds AI's deficit savings largely offset by AI-driven economic disruption. LINK
• JPMorgan warns Strategy's bitcoin sales for dividends add crypto market risk. LINK
• Goldman expects small-cap rally to slow after Russell 2000's 20% surge. LINK

💰 Deal Flow

• ElevenLabs in talks to double valuation to $22 billion in months. LINK
• Sołowow-led group plans £35bn investment in 14 UK small modular reactors. LINK
• eToro leads $12.5 million investment in on-chain futures exchange Extended. LINK
• Microsoft launches $2.5 billion Frontier unit to help clients adopt AI. LINK

📅 Market Calendar

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